We've run through the biggest names in the industry as well as a breakdown of some of the biggest products, but what about a timeline? We jogged our memories with plenty of Starbucks and have attempted to condense the industry's biggest announcements into a month-by-month recap. Enjoy!

January: Beginning a new round of licensing announcements, Funimation picked up Suzuka, Mushishi, and Ragnarok the Animation (the latter spinning off of an MMO game that's popular in Japan and Korea). ADV announced the retro-future espionage action series 009-1. Geneon licensed Rozen Maiden, one of the last shows it finished releasing before its untimely death. Bandai Visual, finally, grabbed its highest-profile release to date, the Gainax revival series Gunbuster 2.

Speaking of Gainax, Shinji Ikari, Rei Ayanami, and the rest of the Evangelion crew became the latest anime heroes to get their own postage stamps in Japan. The mid-'90s megahit joined Astro Boy, Pokemon, Gatchaman, Galaxy Express 999, Mazinger Z, Marvelous Melmo, Time Bokan, Doraemon, Super Jetter, Detective Boy Conan (AKA Case Closed), and the original Mobile Suit Gundam in the Japanese postal service's semiannual series of anime stamps.

Reviews for Studio Ghibli's Gedo Senki: Tales from Earthsea were not especially kind following its 2006 release. The final insult came in the beginning of 2007, when the Japanese weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun voted it the worst movie of the past year in its annual Raspberry awards. Altogether, it's not an auspicious debut for director Goro Miyazaki, son of the slightly more beloved Hayao.

February: Bandai hopped on the 2007 license-go-round, acquiring the sci-fi adventure Tide-Line Blue, the modern war drama FLAG, and My-Otome, the kinda-sorta-sequel to last year's action fave My-HiME. Geneon picked up Karin, the charming vampire comedy that would sadly be left hanging when the company left the U.S. market in the fall.

Funimation released the first discs in its remastered version of the Dragon Ball Z TV series. Though alterations to the show's original aspect ratio raised the hackles of many fans, the new version did feature a considerably cleaned-up picture compared to earlier American editions, as well as a reworked and largely improved English dub.

The live-action film based on Osamu Tezuka's comic strip Dororo hit it big in Japan, holding on to the number one spot at the box office for several weeks. The tale stars a young swordsman made almost completely of artificial parts, fighting to retrieve the lost bits of his body from the demons who bought them from his grasping, ambitious father.

Gainax cranked up the hype machine for its theatrical remake of Evangelion, announcing a September release date for the first movie in the four-film cycle and issuing an optimistic statement from creator Hideaki Anno.

March: Geneon picked up Higurashi no naku koro ni, the disconcertingly grim mystery series based on a popular amateur-produced PC game, and the fantasy action series Shonen Onmyoji. Bandai grabbed Galaxy Angel AA, yet another of several installments in the popular day-glo sci-fi comedy franchise.

Hayao Miyazaki revealed his latest film, Ponyo Above a Cliff, which is still slated to hit Japanese theaters in the summer of 2008. The movie features a young boy and the goldfish he rescues, who claims that she wants to become human.

Central Park Media's surviving manga division found itself in the middle of a complex licensing dispute. The company licensed several titles for its Be Beautiful imprint from the Japanese publisher Biblos, which were later bought up by Libre Publishing when Biblos went out of business. CPM continued publishing those titles without negotiating a new licensing deal with Libre, which led to an unpleasant public spat.

Bandai Visual sealed a distribution deal with Geneon USA, hoping to find a cheaper way of getting its titles to market. Demon Prince Enma, Freedom, Galaxy Angel Rune, Gunbuster 2, and The Wings of Rean made it to shelves by way of Geneon's distro setup, although their departure from the U.S. market later in the year would leave BV in a tight spot. In other industry news, ADV Films served up some of its catalog for download through Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace.

5 Centimeters per Second made its debut in select Japanese theaters. The third project from Makoto Shinkai, who made a big splash a few years back with his self-produced OVA Voices of a Distant Star, looked at the relationship between two young people from several different angles. The film received a positive response over the coming months – reviews were generally kinder than those for his sophomore effort, The Place Promised in Our Early Days.

Blood+ became the latest long-form anime series to get a slot on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block. The sequel to the Production I.G. feature film Blood: The Last Vampire revolved around the same female vampire hunter, but in a modern-day setting and with a whole lot more plot.

Two decades after the original TV series came and went in Japan, director Ryosuke Takahashi revealed a new Armored Trooper Votoms anime, following up on his much-loved existential mecha adventure. The Pailsen Files OVA series debuted later in the summer. In other mecha sequel news, Sunrise surprised nobody by announcing a followup to its latest big-robot hit, Code Geass.

In news big enough to merit its own item, Victor Entertainment revealed a new Macross TV series. The announcement came by way of auditions for an actress and singer to star in the new series, which later acquired the title Macross Frontier. Word is it will follow up on Macross 7, the one installment in the series that's never seen a stateside release, and feature music by Yoko Kanno. It's due to air this coming spring.

April: The spring anime season kicked off in Japan, and the big hit was Lucky Star, the latest production from Kyoto Animation (the hot studio responsible for Haruhi Suzumiya). It's a comedy, but only if you're in on the joke – most of the humor is built out of in-references aimed at hardcore Japanese geeks. Some fans fell in love, while more casual observers scratched their heads in annoyed bemusement.

ImaginAsian Entertainment, operator of a TV network specializing in shows from all over Asia, announced a few of the year's most unlikely licenses. The company picked up the '80s mecha series Orguss, plus the Hojo Tsukasa classic Cat's Eye and Nobody's Boy Remi, a '70s-vintage drama about a wandering orphan. In other licensing news, Media Blasters grabbed Aoi and Mutsuki, sequel to the cult favorite Stellar Buster Mito, and Geneon picked up Zero's Familiar, one of the series it never managed to get out the door.

Several manga series garnered nominations for the prestigious Eisner Awards, in part because the awards created a new category specifically for Japanese comics. Naoki Urasawa's Monster was nominated in the general category of best continuing series, though, while Vertical's edition of Ode to Kirihito and Drawn & Quarterly's collection of Abandon the Old in Tokyo both received nods in the Best Archival Project category. The award for best edition of Japanese material eventually went to Dark Horse's release of Old Boy, by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi, the series that inspired the Korean film of the same name.

Funimation licensed the popular pirate adventure series One Piece, promising a newly dubbed version and subtitled, unedited DVDs. The news was welcomed by fans of the series, who were generally less than enthusiastic about the earlier dubbed (and heavily edited) version produced by 4Kids Entertainment.

Techno artists m.o.v.e. – best known to anime fans for their tunes on the Initial D soundtrack – played a concert at Sakura-Con in Seattle, continuing the trend in big-name Japanese musical acts at American anime conventions. Later in the year, Otakon would play host to visual kei pioneers Dir en Grey, while Anime Expo featured ORESKABAND and the first appearance of J-rock supergroup SKIN. On a slightly different note, Pittsburgh's Tekkoshocon hosted a performance by Mari Iijima, the voice of Macross heroine Lynn Minmay.

Seven Seas Entertainment would have rather the media paid attention to its growing line of original English-language comics – some of which, like Hollow Fields, are among 2007's sharpest releases. Unfortunately, it caught a bad case of bad press, focusing on a comic called The Nymphet. Released in Japan as Kodomo no Jikan, it stars a third-grade girl with a crush on her teacher and a tendency to express her feelings in distressingly explicit terms. Seven Seas' Jason DeAngelis defended the decision to license Kodomo, but as backlash began building in response to the announcement, Seven Seas pulled the title from its publishing schedule.

The annual Tezuka Awards spotlighted a few lesser-known manga this year. Maihime Ôåñøé÷üñá, by Ryoko Yamagishi, won the grand prize for its portrayal of a young ballerina. (In case you're curious, the latter half of the title is in Greek.) Osaka Hamlet, a slice-of-life series by Hiromi Morishita, won the prize for best short story, while Nobuhisa Nozoe and Kazuhiro Iwata took the prize for best new artist, on the strength of their series The Divine Comedy. Though the name comes from Dante, it's based on a novel about life in the Japanese army before World War II.